Argumentative Essay: Community College Should Not Be Free

Community College Should Not Be Free President Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders have been discussing making two years of community college tuition free, one hundred percent free on the student’s part. Is it actually free for the students? Doesn’t the United States already have programs that are supposed to help low-income students afford their tuition? How could it affect the taxpayers or even taxes? But the real question is should the United States truly have free community college? The answer to that question is no. College will still be a struggle for lower-income families. The United States already has grants to help lower-income families. Students will still struggle with debt. They may have a budget planned out for this plan, but where is the money coming from? Citizens of the United States’ taxes would become higher. Students have a better chance of graduating if they’re paying for it. For those reasons and many more, the United States should not have free community college. To begin with, several countries overseas have free tuition for their students, including Sweden and Germany. The idea sounds great when so many other countries have free college. Why shouldn’t the U.S. make their tuition free? Students will still struggle with the cost of college. It isn’t just the tuition these kids pay. It’s the rent, the groceries, the textbooks, and …show more content…
Germany has a 49.3% tax wedge because of having free community college. As of right now, the United States’ tax wedge sits at 31.5% (Jackson). That’s a ten percent increase that the citizens of the United States could be looking at. In 2012, colleges collected over sixty-two billion dollars from undergrads (Weissmann). Which is above the proposed budget that it supposed to last for ten years. The only way the United States could afford to do that would be to make cuts and increase taxes. Is that really going to benefit the United States when the cost of living is already so